Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Obama 2012



Today you can buy another cup of coffee—or give support for the only President to acknowledge that all Americans should have affordable health care, women should earn the same as men and have the right to make choices about their bodies, my "partner" and I can be in a legal union after eighteen years, etc etc etc...  It's only $3, but it's a karmic message that proclaims we do not tie our dogs to our roofs, we do not beat up people with long hair, we do not hide our millions to avoid paying taxes, we do not believe 47% of us are helpless users and we do not deregulate the systems that sustain our welfare as a populace to keep $20 in our pockets at the end of the year.

$3 is nothing, but it's also EVERYTHING.

Click here to donate $3 to the Obama campaign unless you truly believe this country should only exist for white wealthy heterosexual employed native non-disabled healthy English-speaking Christian men.

Thursday, August 2, 2012

Forty is the New Forty

Michael Grant bathes in the Ganges in Rishikesh back in the past when he was only 39.
The stages of death—anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance—may also be used to chronicle the way I am experiencing the departure of my beloved thirties.  As I enter into an unknown decade, one that appears to be populated by greying rogue hairs, andropause, lowered metabolisms, higher cholesterols and the stirrings of future creaks and nasty tennis injuries,  I wonder:  Will my forties be marked by a rapid anatomical decline, or am I, perhaps, on the verge of my most empowered decade?  Will I, like Don Draper, master my craft and rule my dominion?  Will I value myself?  Will I make more money?  Will I make keener choices?  Do I still have more to learn?  Will I eat better?

The difference between ten and twenty was tremendous, but the difference between twenty and thirty seemed marginal. So why does thirty-to-forty feel like a larger leap than the other two combined? What is it about turning forty that instigates the mid-life crises where men dump their wives and buy sports cars and women dump their friends and start new careers?  Why all the madness and misery?  Why when we admit we actually feel okay about turning forty do our peers remark that we're 'handling it well'?  Out of a possible 300,000 words in the English language, the only one that accurate describes turning forty is FUCK.  Why?

Anger.  I don't want to turn forty, except that the alternative of not turning forty seems worse.  I feel like throwing shoes and throwing up.  When I make the bed today I'll undoubtedly smash my pillows a little more than is necessary for their plumping fluff.  Doors beware, you may be slammed.  I'm pissed that the illusion of time is so readily palpable and defining.  I'm vexed that there's no attractive alternative.  When I was growing up I had a friend with a tattoo on his foot that read 4/12/2012.  He claimed it was his expiration date and if he wasn't "something" by then he would throw a big party and kill himself.  I told him if he wasn't "something" then no one would know about his party and it would be a flop. I have to find him.  I have a compulsion to slap him today because of my anger because of this turning-forty thing.  I'm generally not like this.

Denial.  I FEEL nineteen.  Well, maybe twenty-three.  Okay, twenty-seven.  Certainly no more than thirty-one.   Or thirty-five.  I remember everything I experienced as a child, which was just a few clicks back on my mental calendar, so how can I possibly be forty?  My DAD is forty.  Well, he was.  Once.  A long time ago, yeah, yeah...  So turning forty may have happened to all of my friends and most of my family and even strangers at the supermarket, but that doesn't mean it has to happen to me.  People tell me forty is still young, but it was easier to believe when they were jealous I was thirty.  Now I'm harder to convince.  Who are these people, anyway?  Forty?  I deny this.  I was asked for my ID at the liquor store just last week.   I have the jawline of a teenager and the wonder of a toddler.  I can beat this.   Clearly they made that cake with all of those candles for someone else...

Bargaining.  If I can get to Hawaii before midnight I may be able to salvage just a few more hours in my thirties...

Depression.  This is how it goes.  One day you're practicing backflips in your backyard and thinking that people in college are really old and really smart, and then you're looking at your friends' kids who are about to enter college and you're wondering when the higher institutions started admitting children.  The student becomes the master, except I don't feel like I've mastered anything yet.  When I turned thirty I had rental properties and a store and a successful film festival and a nifty house and a reliable social community.  I had a savings account.  I had all of my grandparents. Now I'm turning forty and the house needs a lot of work, the social community has slimmed, and the rest is gone for good.  The yard is bare, the rains come, the grass grows and the flowers bloom, the bees hum and the butterfies frolic.  Then the grass gets cut, the tomatoes are picked, the sun sets early and the yard yields to the first crunchy frost.  Forty is an August mowing.  The cut.  The line.  (Sigh).

Acceptance. Okay, my life is good.  Really good.  Great, actually.  Follow this logic: if I didn't turn forty I wouldn't be able to celebrate eighteen beautiful years with my husband.  I've learned about loss, both in business and personally, and I've survived with new skills and instincts.  I've learned how to say NO to the things I don't want to do, or be (okay,  maybe I'm still working on that).   And I have new abilities: I can wake up earlier without being so bothered.  I can take time to read or play piano or walk the dog  without fretting about my other pressing responsibilities.  I can go into a grocery store and know how my food choices are going to affect me long-term.  I can spend money with some responsibility and I can make money doing jobs that don't compromise my values.  I pick better movies to watch.  I have gained the luxury of (a modicum of) hindsight.

And I still have goals.

If I'm forty then I'm closer to realizing my dreams than I was when I was twenty or thirty.
If I'm forty then I'm closer to gaining the wisdom of my grandparents.
If I'm forty then I'm closer to relating to my parents and their own experiences of life.
If I'm forty then my adventures will take on a new immediacy which will empower their enactment.
If I'm forty then my teachers were right and one day I did grow up.  Or at least on the surface.

I'm forty.  It's impossible, but it's true.  It's ridiculous, but it's fact.  It's astonishing and it's accurate.
Some might say it's an accomplishment.  Others say it's not a big deal and they are correct, too.
I'm forty and it's good to be forty.
People take you seriously when you're forty.
They may even believe what you write on your blog.

MG 

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Siblings


A speech from the joint unveiling memorial service for
Edith Prostkoff (Grandma) & Myron Reis (Uncle Mike)
Sunday, July 8th, 2012

I'm going to talk for a few minutes about Uncle Mike & Grandma not as individuals, but as siblings, and the significance of that particular relationship as it pertained to their lives, and ours.

One of the requisite characteristics to being a quality human being is knowing how to share.
It's one of the first lessons we're taught in school, and it is an instruction that it reiterated throughout our personal and professional lives.  Sharing.  And no relationship prepares us better or teaches us more about sharing than being a sibling.

Genetics aside, as siblings we share the resources in the house, the food on the table, bedrooms and bathrooms and even the remote control on the TV.  As we get older, if we're close enough in age, we start to share experiences beyond the home.  We may have the same teachers and maybe even the same friends.  What we learn from being a sibling, and all of this sharing, is that sometimes we're going to be expected to put another person in front of ourselves.  We're forced to recognize that we're not the only person who has a need.  There are other people in this world, and your sibling serves as a constant reminder of this.

We should take this responsibility not as a task, but as a gift.  If we're lucky, our sibling can be our confidant, our cohort and our example.  We can learn from our sibling's failures and successes as much as from our own.  Our brother or sister can be our friend because he or she is sharing our life, our situations, our parents' displeasures or respect…   With your sibling you can view your parents together as those taller, older alien beings who seem to have an entirely different sense of the world.  As you grow up, you and your siblings will form your own new realities together.

Even when siblings move away from each other the sharing need not end.  When our identities are more-or-less formed and we see ourselves as individuals, that's when we start to share the bigger things: ideas, perspectives, events and philosophies.  We share the pleasures and sorrows of life.  It can be tricky to stay connected when we're no longer playing the same games with the same rules.  Maybe we don't share geography, or even some of the same values.  This can create a dynamic situation, but it's still good because the sibling that knows you helps you to further define yourself.   In architecture and photography the negative space can be just as defining as the subject itself.

So… Grandma and Uncle Mike.  I honestly don't know much about what their life was like when they were children, but they always maintained their connection to each other, even when they realized they were their own people and they were leading very different lives.  At some point it didn't matter if they had kids or if they were observant in the same ways, or who had a house where because they always stayed connected through their common history and they held their mutual interest in family and each other. Their relationship was forged in steel and gold.

When Mike died a  year ago Grandma said "I lost my Baby Brother." The baby brother who wasn't a baby for over eighty years was perpetually her baby brother.  That was very telling to me.  I'm sure their relationship had its set of bumps, as all relationships do, but they were always able to go back and reapply that most important lesson from their childhood:  To Share.

Mike & Edith were citizens of the world in large part because of their connection to each other.  They both taught, they both gave back, and they were social.  They had friends and they made an impact on their communities.  They had the capacity to see beyond themselves and they recognized that we don't  have to be trapped inside our own egos all of the time.  And that's because they were siblings and the sibling relationship is unique in that way.  It always brings you back and for this reason it is special.  Sacred.  Like anything else it requires care and nurturing, but so long as we remember to share, even when we don't agree,  we're going to recognize that these differences actually help us too, just as they always have.

I think it's fitting that we're honoring Grandma and Mike in this memorial service together.  After everything they went through together from practically the same starting point to practically the same end, it's amazing to think that now they're their in their final resting place together. They're lives were a beautiful poem of intersecting stanzas, connected and disparate ideas, but with common imagery, memory and a base.  As we plot our own courses we'll continue to read the versus of their poem -- and share them with each other until we arrive at our own ending verse.